24 January 2012

Tuesday Crustie: Fresh ink

Keeping with last week’s hydrothermal vent crustaceans...

This is another hydrothermal vent shrimp, Alvinocaris komaii. The tattoo belongs to one of the authors who formally described it for science, Kevin Zelnio of Deep Sea News. It was completed last week at the Science Online 2012 conference, by Dogstar Tattoo.

This shrimp lives near hydrothermal vents just north of New Zealand, where they normally are found on beds of mussels. They are probably generalist feeders.

One of the recurring questions with hydrothermal vent animals is that given that the vents are so separated, how do the animals living at them disperse from vent to vent? The paper alludes that that when it discusses the relationships between the shrimps in this genus. The geographic locations of the species don’t seem to make well with the relationships, which would be consistent with animals that have to disperse widely and live in short-lived habitats.

It’s interesting to compare this artistic rendition to the formal figure from the paper:

Reference

Zelnio K, Hourdez S. 2009. A new species of Alvinocaris (Crustacea: Decapoda: Caridea: Alvinocarididae) from hydrothermal vents at the Lau Basin, Southwest Pacific, and a key to the species of Alvinocarididae. Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington122(1): 52-71. DOI: 10.2988/07-28.1